Piano

How to spell piano

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce piano

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does piano mean?

1. nounA large keyboard instrument that produces sound when hammers strike strings as the keys are pressed.
2. adverbA direction in written music instructing the performer to play softly or quietly.

Piano in a sentence

• noun

  She practised the piano for an hour every evening.

• adverb

  The score marks the opening bars piano, so the strings begin very gently.

• noun

  They hired movers to carry the grand piano up the stairs.

• adverb

  The conductor asked the choir to sing the refrain piano rather than at full volume.

Where does piano come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word piano is a clipped form of the Italian pianoforte, the name Bartolomeo Cristofori gave around 1700 to his new keyboard instrument. He called it gravicembalo col piano e forte, meaning 'harpsichord with soft and loud', because unlike the harpsichord it could play notes both quietly and loudly depending on how hard the keys were struck. The element piano comes from the Latin planus, which literally meant 'flat' or 'level' and later drifted in Italian toward the idea of something smooth, gentle, and therefore quiet, while forte meant 'strong' or 'loud'. English borrowed the full word in the eighteenth century and quickly shortened it to piano for the instrument, keeping the original piano as a direction in written music meaning 'softly'. The same Latin planus also underlies everyday English words like 'plain' and 'plane', a tidy reminder that the spelling keeps a single n and ends in a plain -o.

How the word is built

• piano (Italian for 'soft', from Latin planus meaning 'flat' or 'level'); a shortening of pianoforte ('soft-loud')